This application claims benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-120495 filed on Apr. 21, 2000, the contents of which are incorporated by the reference.
The present invention relates to recording/reproducing systems and, more particularly, to real time recording/reproducing systems for recording and real time (instantaneously) reproducing image (or video) data.
Real time recording/reproducing systems have been proposed and practically used, in which television (TV) signals and also signals (image signals) externally inputted from video decks or the like are real time digitally coded and recorded in a recorder, and also in which the recorded digital image signals are decompressed to data covering a given time for time shift reproduction. Such a real time recording/reproducing system is disclosed in, for instance, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-30851 entitled “Television Broadcast Recording System”.
Such a prior art real time recording/reproducing system may, in constitution, make use of personal computer (PC) software processing. In such a case, performance insufficiency of CPU (central processing unit) may arise when the system is operated in parallel with other applications or at the moment of starting the same. In consequence, it becomes impossible to obtain full frame real time capturing, real time compression and real time decompression. This leads to missing of frame data in the compression processing and delay in the reproducing processing and also to a further problem of deviation from synchronism of image and voice to each other.